PAUL BAILEY is a British writer and critic, author of several novels as well as memoir and biographies. He is a winner of numerous awards and has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Paul Bailey won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1953 and worked as an actor between 1956 and 1964. He became a freelance writer in 1967.

He was appointed Literary Fellow at Newcastle and Durham Universities (1972-4), and was awarded a Bicentennial Fellowship in 1976, enabling him to travel to the USA, where he was Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at the North Dakota State University (1977-9). He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1974 and in1978 he won the George Orwell Prize for his essay “The Limitations of Despair”, first published in The Listener magazine.

Paul Bailey’s novels include At The Jerusalem (1967), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Writers’ Award; Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977) and Gabriel’s Lament (1986), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; and Sugar Cane (1993), a sequel to Gabriel’s Lament. Kitty and Virgil (1998) is the story of the relationship between an Englishwoman and an exiled Romanian poet.

In Uncle Rudolf (2002), the narrator looks back on his colourful life and his rescue as a young boy from fascist Romania, by his uncle, a gifted lyric tenor.

His latest book is “Chapman’s Odyssey” (2011), in which the main character, Harry Chapman, in morphine-induced delirium, encounters an all-star cast of characters from public and private history.

Last evening, during Julian Barnes’ acceptance speech for the 2011 Man Booker Prize he offered some advice to publishers: “Those of you who have seen my book, whatever you think of its contents, will probably agree it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the ebook, it has to look like something worth buying, worth keeping.”1 Chapman’s Odyssey is one such book. Beautiful.

LIZ JENSEN was born in Oxfordshire, and read English at Somerville College, Oxford. She worked first as a journalist in Hongkong and Taiwan, then a TV and radio producer for the BBC in the UK, then a sculptor and freelance journalist.

Her work has been short-listed for the Guardian Fiction award, nominated three times for the Orange Prize, developed for film, and translated into more than 20 languages. Liz Jensen is currently working on her eighth novel, a ghost story. She divides her time between London and Copenhagen.

She is Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University.

‘Jensen is becoming one of our best writers, sometimes surreal, sometimes down to earth, always with a great and embracing human sympathy’ – Fay Weldon